Friday, Dec 29, 2017, 6:00 am

Can the Community Rights Movement Fix Capitalism?

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(Image: bioneers.org)

Editor’s Note: The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) is a nonprofit public interest law firm that works to advance democratic, economic, social and environmental rights over those of corporations. In its own words, the organization “assists communities across the United States to challenge the unjust and harmful economic system we live under.” Thomas Linzey, a frequent Rural America In These Times contributor, is CELDF’s co-founder and executive director. In the following essay he discusses strategy—what works and what doesn’t when it comes to accelerating systemic change.

While I shouldn’t be surprised anymore when someone at a conference asks why CELDF’s community organizing doesn’t take on capitalism directly, the question still startles me. The intimation is that our work nibbles around the edges, rather than being focused on directly changing the underlying economic system that rewards community-destroying behavior. Therefore, the question suggests, CELDF’s work is destined to fail.

Not only does the question reflect a misunderstanding of our work, it also buys into the myth of how systems change.

For decades now, liberal academics and activists have decried the way our economic system works. They’ve picked our system apart piece by piece, while doing various post-mortems on the ways that capitalism has responded to everything from the Great Depression to environmentalism. They’ve written enough books to fill a library, given enough speeches for everyone to have grown tired of hearing them, and taken up enough of the public space so that the contours of the elephant in the room have now been fully dissected ad nauseum.

From one vantage point, they’ve done yeoman’s work: Fashioning a comprehensive critique of capitalism has not been an easy task. This is particularly true in the face of the rabid “free market” functionaries who march in lockstep across every television and newspaper. But from another vantage point, that critique has birthed a litmus test for activism that is impossible to achieve. It says that unless you’re proposing a wholly packaged system of replacement, and the means for that wholesale replacement, then the work you’re doing doesn’t have a prayer of changing anything.

Is wholesale replacement necessary? Perhaps, but the economic models drawn up in lecture halls likely aren’t the substitutes. Those are generally mired in the “old left” way of thinking—placing trust in government rather than in private market actors. One could argue, however, that both systems have equally tortured Earth on the rack, the only difference being whether private corporations or governments are at the wheel.

Back to basics

So, we need to start with the fundamentals. As historian Richard Grossman once declared, the bedrock functioning of all current economic systems requires control over Earth’s resources, and the labor necessary to extract them. For that purpose, those economic systems create centralized authorities that either control natural resources and labor themselves, or create the conditions for private entities to do so.

In the United States, our federal and state legal systems fall into the latter category—serving to protect, insulate and enhance the authority of private entities to run the show.

This is why ecosystems and nature are considered “property” in the eyes of the law. It’s why the owner of those ecosystems has the legal authority to destroy them. It’s why workers lack constitutional rights in the workplace against their employers, why oil and gas can be legally taken from landowners without their permission under “forced pooling” laws, and why people within their own cities, towns, villages and countries are prohibited from banning corporate factory farms, genetically modified organisms, oil and gas extraction, and a litany of other harmful corporate projects.

Those wishing to change that system must come to grips with the fact that people do not embrace wholesale change immediately. First, a corporate hog farm sites next door to them, or pesticide spraying threatens their organic garden. Logically, their focus is on stopping those activities that are threatening to harm them.

When they learn that the current system of law forces them to endure those harms, they begin to understand that what is happening in their community is not an isolated example. Instead, their problem is structural, and not easily fixed. Without the community’s firsthand experience, and the guidance of those who have seen it before, a critique of the system at the outset simply finds no purchase.

(Image: AZ quotes)

Changing the system by seizing it

CELDF’s work offers a frame through which to understand that world. It works with those people on the receiving end of the system, to become the ones who change it.

They begin changing it by seizing their municipal governments to free themselves from a number of controlling legal doctrines of the past. These include: corporate constitutional “rights” that guarantee that corporate decisions override community decision-making; the authority of state government and the federal government to protect business entities by preempting the community from adopting laws that interfere with corporate proposals; and the legal doctrines that require the state government’s pre-approval for lawmaking by the community.

By forcing a recognition of their own right to govern themselves, and using that right to stop that which is harming them, people and communities seek to put capitalism in a box. It is a box in which projects that violate the rights of communities and nature are prohibited. Those projects that do not violate rights, are not prohibited.

The work seeks nothing less than to remove centralized control over nature and people by building a bulwark of rights for human and natural communities. With those forced changes to the system, is it still capitalism?

Would anyone care if it was?

Through those exigencies of the moment, it is time to create a new economic and political system piece by piece—one that has, perhaps, never been seen before. The newness of the moment, far from giving us pause, should instead validate our belief that it’s the only work worth doing.

("Capitalism: The Elephant in the Room" was first published on CELDF's website and is reposted on Rural America In These Times with permission from the author. For more information about the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, click here.)

Thomas Linzey, a contributing writer to Rural America In These Times, is the executive director and co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and serves as the organization’s chief legal counsel.

Why is this site censoring comments? They just seem to disappear without addressing the reasons for it.

Posted by NoDifference on 2018-02-18 17:10:01

Please define the word "compellingly" to me. I cannot find it in any dictionary.Thanks in advance.

Posted by Roc RIzzo on 2018-01-25 13:29:19

What he cannot imagine is listening to his neighbor. I wouldn't give him another second's attention, because he isn't even reading what you write. His cynicism controls his entire spirit & being.

Posted by walterjessesmith on 2018-01-25 07:30:43

Many US corporations demonstrate those things more compellingly every day. Don't let the deniers & self-deceivers bug you.

Posted by walterjessesmith on 2018-01-25 07:28:54

Anarchism has not yet discerned how to overcome its tendencies toward violence. When it comes with the UP FRONT NON VIOLENT PARTICIPATION ONLY commitment, then, and only then, do we have any way of holding its adherents accountable to any common decency.

As for the author initial puzzle in the article, perhaps the author could trust his body a bit more and learn something from it. "While I shouldn’t be surprised anymore when someone at a conference asks why CELDF’s community organizing doesn’t take on capitalism directly, the question still startles me." When one's body is startled, one's body is screaming at its inhabitant: HELLO?

Analyzing the question is no way to address the respondent, or to address the fact that the question predictably startles.

Perhaps having a competent answer would help; and why not present it as a question: "How do we more directly confront capitalism than by organizing citizens to work together to manage it properly?"

We all know we have no national governmental capacity to govern capitalism.

If we do not do it where we live, there are no more options.

The planet will remove us because we cannot find enough conservative instinct, capacity, or effort to save ourselves from our own nonsense.

Species are dying off now at a rate comparable only to the previous five great extinction die-offs. We humans have no guarantees that we are any more resilient than the last species that died off. All we have are numbers.

We know from history that nature can remove masses of us in minutes.

Posted by walterjessesmith on 2018-01-25 07:25:49

You don't need a lot of money, you need people. People who are organized behind something are much more powerful than money.

Posted by Roc RIzzo on 2018-01-11 10:24:26

Well, if you want to start acting and changing, you best get a really BIG, BIG box and fill it with money.

You see, MONEY is what it takes to pay bribes.

That's how the American worker was cheated out of his union and ended up working a TEMP job that pays $2 above minimum wage.

There is one other way that I know of.

Attack and kill the rich, who own everything.

Mankind is doomed to extinction. Has been since the Dark Ages and the time of pyramids and pharoahs.

Greed and lust and taking everything and sharing nothing are the emotions that control the world.

I know this, so I simply sit back and await my own death.

That's my golden parachute exit strategy from this chaos.

You really need to begin by CHANGING the very emotions that cause one man to hoard billions of dollars while the employees that created that wealth starve in the cold, out on the sidewalks.

Sadly, we just do not live in a "Share and share-alike" sort of world anymore!

Posted by John Smith on 2018-01-08 17:39:58

And a real fool accepts things in the fear that they will not change. It takes dreams, and people willing to think outside the box, and act on it. Only when we can identify a problem, and work on a solution can we work to alleviate the problem. If we just accept a problem and do nothing about it, nothing gets done to change things for the better.So, instead of "Gee wouldn't it be nice if there were no hurricanes and no floods," we examine the situation, and say, "What can we do to defend our selves from hurricanes and floods, and what can we do to prevent them," we can start to work on a solution to the issue. Even if the floods and hurricanes are going to kill us in the present, if we pose a solution that future generations can work on, then we have at least have done half of the job.

Posted by Roc RIzzo on 2018-01-08 16:54:15

Hey, good for you!

Your little make-believe world sounds fine and dandy, to be sure.

Unfortunately, the people who have the money are driven by GREED and a total LACK of CONCERN for everyone else.

So, as nice as your way sounds, the reality of it ever happening is less than the odds of winning the mega-lottery!

"Gee, wouldn't it be nice if there were no hurricanes and no floods?" the fool asks, as the water rushes over his head. He'll be dead in the next two minutes, of course.

See the world as it IS, rather than how you wish it was. Cause all the dreamin' and hoping in the world will add up to NOTHING!

Posted by John Smith on 2018-01-08 15:50:54

Why is it that in the "greatest" democracy in the world, the de facto economic system is governed more like a dictatorship than a democracy? In a democracy everyone gets a say in what goes on, In a dictatorship one or a few people get to say what goes on. In order for capitalism to survive, it must become a democracy, and have everyone who works for a company make the decisions as to what happens with said company. Yes, the owner makes the initial investment to create the company, but without his or her workers, there would be no business. This is especially true in larger businesses. Capitalism cannot survive if only a few make profits, and make decisions. If workers had a stake in the business that they work in, they could probably come up with better decisions for our economy, especially the local economy than if a small board of directors made decisions only to benefit themselves. Time to think about worker owned and operated businesses. Not small board of directors owned corporations.

Posted by Roc RIzzo on 2017-12-30 11:21:26

"Is wholesale replacement necessary? Perhaps, but the economic models drawn up in lecture halls likely aren’t the substitutes. Those are generally mired in the “old left” way of thinking—placing trust in government rather than in private market actors."Anarchism avoids both extremes, of top-down government rule and the dog-eat-dog social Darwinism of the "free market". Decisions are reached by the people themselves, deciding what is best for their communities. Zapatismo shows how communities can be organized and run without government.

Posted by Jerald Davidson on 2017-12-30 10:38:02

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